It’s a simple, everyday object you may have used this morning, or perhaps have on the table right now: a drinking glass.

And you likely aren’t paying a bit of attention to the shape of the glass, the pattern on it, or how the light plays off it.

But that same common item takes on a whole new meaning when put on display at Balboa Park’s Mingei International Museum in a compelling new exhibition, “True Blue.”

Of course, the glasses on exhibit are from Japan, delicately etched and finely ornamented in cobalt. But they are still just a set of glasses, although now that you are looking at them differently, they are also something more (perhaps your glass is as well).

That’s the point of the Mingei Museum.

“Many things in our collection don’t have to be this exquisitely made, this deliberately etched,” said Rob Sidner, the Mingei’s director, pointing at the Japanese set.

“Look at these wonderfully woven materials,” he said, turning to one of several fabric pieces in the show, a corte, or ceremonial skirt, from Guatemala. “There was great care taken to get this marvelous color. People didn’t know how not to make things beautiful yet.

“They were making things for their use and for the use of their communities. In traditional cultures, they had time. Traditions were passed on and on and on. ... There wasn’t a lot of analysis involved; they just continued to make things beautifully.”

‘Blue’ notes

Sidner is curating “True Blue” himself. He’s been thinking about the concept for years, even before he took over the museum’s directorship in 2006 from its founder, Martha Longenecker. She hired him in 1993 as membership coordinator, although he served the institution in a number of roles, including assistant director, during her tenure.

“I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for a long time,” Sidner said, looking at a display case with dozens, if not hundreds, of blue beads, each one different from the other. “Kristine Knoke, the director of exhibitions (whom Sidner hired in 2010 from the Norton Simon Museum), and I talk about all sorts of things. We decided it’s time to do this blue show.”

The exhibition, which opened over the weekend and continues through Feb. 17, is largely drawn from the museum’s extensive permanent collection. It covers a broad range of cultures and mediums, from fabric to glass, the American Southwest to Tibet.

They all have in common a fascination with blue, evident in the use of turquoise, lapis lazuli and cobalt, which have been mined for thousands of years, and natural indigo, whose extraction from the indigofera tinctoria plant (and others) dates back at least to the ancient Greeks (although it’s been supplanted for more than a century by aniline blue dyes, now ubiquitous in bluejeans).

“I think for many, many people, blue is a very alluring and rather exotic color,” Sidner said. “It expresses the depths, people in the blues, in the pits — and it expresses the exhilaration of blue sky and ocean and all of that. It takes people in both directions. So there’s all that emotional resonance connected with it. And there are these gorgeous objects besides.”

Although a few of the objects in the show, in particular glass works by Dale Chihuly, have a purely sculptural function, most of the hundreds of pieces are as practical as those water glasses, whether a simple pair of blue boots from China (although a careful look at the material and the embroidery reveals they aren’t so simple), an elaborately woven coat from Japan or a blue basket from the U.S. Many employ a craft and technique handed down through the generations.

“They aren’t just following a formula, or a recipe, or reproducing one after another, trying to make it exactly like the other,” Sidner said. “Each one is fresh and new. That’s, I think, where the beauty comes from. Yanagi, ﻿the man who coined the word (‘Mingei’), used to say it was an unfragmented expression of head and heart and hands. So it’s a whole human action. And humans can’t help it.

“It’s when we get so separated from things and we fragment that maybe things stop being beautiful and so they stop being art.”

Creative impulse

Sidner recalls Longenecker, whom he considers both a friend and a mentor, believing that even drug addiction and other societal problems were caused by individuals either resisting their artistic impulses or never having the opportunity to exercise them.

“Underneath ‘Mingei,’ the philosophy and idea, is the conviction that every human being is creative,” Sidner said. “But it has to be unlocked; people have to be exposed to it. It might not be visual artfulness; it might be music, it might be cooking, it might be lots of different things. But the human species is creative. … We want to inspire people to believe in their own creativity.”

Among the exhibition’s many surprises and delights are several toys, including a pair of miniature toy trucks that have obviously been handmade with a care and imagination far beyond the toy’s humble function. In our “good enough” culture, “True Blue” is a reminder that even in the most simple, basic things, people are capable of “better than expected.”

“We’re looking at people’s daily lives, and things that they’ve used and surrounded themselves with,” Sidner said. “They’ve lived with these things. They’ve worn them. They’ve used them. And they added immeasurably to their lives, but almost in an unconscious way.

“That’s what this museum is really at its core about: Continuing to urge people to look around themselves, to keep their eyes open, and to discover beauty where it’s unexpected.”